viz.

(Image credit: Southwest Airlines)

I found myself in an odd place a few nights ago: I was flying at 40,000 feet from Chicago to Austin in a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737, and I was listening to this season’s first night of Major League Baseball. How did I do this, you might ask. Nope, didn’t leave my cell phone’s 3G on. I purchased Southwest’s in-flight Wi-Fi for the price of $8, and at 1 mbps I was set to go. You wouldn’t believe how much I enjoyed the flight. It was pure fun. Much of this must have had something to do with the fact that ever since 9/11 I’d associated air travel with inconvenience. I’d even assumed that in-flight Wi-Fi would be unwieldy. For, previously I’d heard that Southwest’s in-flight Wi-Fi hovered around 1 mbps, and being a literature guy even way back in high school when we covered such things in my computer science class (which means that I’d spend those nights reading Lord of the Rings rather than about bandwidth in my computer science textbook), this seemed like an inordinately small amount of bandwidth. Hence my elation when the sounds of summer were back and I was enjoying Major League Baseball by the time the beverage cart came around, with no bandwidth problems to speak of.

(Image credit: ABC TV)

On one level I enjoyed the experience simply because I hadn’t expected to hear my ball team’s first game of the new season on account of the flight. There was that elation that only comes with something you didn’t expect to receive. But aside from that, on a deeper level, I think I enjoyed the experience because I was enjoying the great American pastime in proper American style, which is to say in excess. No, there weren’t oversized fountain drinks. And no, I wasn’t being bombarded with adds for this coal company or that insurance company. But I was listening to a game that belongs in the countryside 40,000 feet in the air. At its heart, baseball is a pastoral game, isn’t it? Even if fans aren’t thinking about it, I’m sure part of the pleasure that most derive from the game stems from the fact that the sport allows us to experience the rural in the midst of the urban. And though I’d like to ponder whether or not this illusion is healthy, for the purposes of this blog it’s probably best to think of it as a subtle rhetorical appeal. And I can attest that this appeal even works at 40,000 feet. So though one might think that live sports are out of place on a cross-country flight (not to mention Wi-Fi), I’m happy to attest that they enrich the experience.